familypediawikiaorg-20200214-history
Forum:Hey Robin or WM- edit MediaWiki:Common.css
Ever wondered why our tables and what not don't look the same after they are imported from WP? It's because we have to copy over the same cascading style sheets to our wiki. No use hiding Robin and WM- I can see you have Sysop flags on your accounts, so you can do this. Just edit: MediaWiki:Common.css Copy over the stuff in WP's Common.css from here: wikipedia:MediaWiki:Common.css If you want to go slow, fine, you can enable one thing at a time, then copy over a WP page that uses the style and see that what I say is true. Okeydokey? [[User:Phlox|'~'' Phlox']] 04:04, 21 September 2007 (UTC) :I HAD wondered why a significant minority of copied templates look ugly, but correspondence on the central Wikia email list convinced me that it was largely because Wikia doesn't yet have something with a name like "tidy html" (and that it was not easy to incorporate). Robin Patterson 12:08, 22 September 2007 (UTC) :I've visually compared the two files you refer to. Next-to-nothing in common (no pun intended). Do you want us to add the WP stuff at the bottom or what? Maybe you can put your proposed version on the talk page so we can test it easily and revert just as easily if anyone sees a problem? Robin Patterson 12:08, 22 September 2007 (UTC) ::#Copy paste the text of User:Phlox/monobook.css to User:Robin Patterson/monobook.css (anyone else that wants to play with this can do the same.) ::#Don't worry about fomatting. Don't put any pre around it or anything. just leave it as is. In a day the formatting will magically look nice. ::#Now look at William the conquerer article ported to Genealogy ::#:It should look for the most part ok ::#Now log out and look at the article again. ::#:It should look crappy- eg the infobox should be flush left, and the tables at the end should be mostly messed up ::#Log back in, everything looks great again. ::Once you are satisfied, replace the contents of MediaWiki:Common.css with this, and everyone else will have the benefit of them regardless if they are logged out or not. If you suspect anything is wrong, merely revert MediaWiki_talk:Common.css to the version we are currently suffering under. ::This is just a first cut. Many things remain- There is a bunch of stuff in Monobook.css we need to copy over to our Monobook.css and I need to figure out what hoop we jump through to get the navbox collapsible style. I haven't had time to examine everything, but as you will see, all I did was make an exact copy of the wikipedia common.css beginning at the table styles. We probably want the stuf before the tables, but I haven't messed with verifying it what that stuff does. [[User:Phlox|'~'' Phlox']] 04:37, 2 October 2007 (UTC) :::Thank you for the clear explanation. However, I expect it is unwise for us on Wikia to copy the whole of a Wikipedia css instead of getting one that our Wikia experts and/or staff have tweaked. Aren't the css files a collection of instructions? Some individual instructions that are on Wikia but not WP could be vital for some aspects of the displays, not necessarily showing up on your tests. Your phrase "enable one thing at a time" looks like a good precaution; but I don't know what is "one thing at a time" in a css file. My programming stopped with Commodore BASIC v 3.5. Comments? Robin Patterson 12:33, 2 October 2007 (UTC) :Exactly why as you will see, my copy doesn't contain the entire common.css from WP. I restricted it to table style definitions. (It's pretty easy to see what I did- I chopped out all the front matter settings and took everything after the table definitions started.) :Anyway, the style sheets for tables are like macros. The only people affected by these additions are people actually using those table styles- which is practically zero, because they look crappy if you use them, since there are no CSS settings that correspond to those table style names. :As long as we do not have table styles that match those of wikipedia, it will be exceptionally difficult to leverage biographies from Wikipedia. It's important. So let's get this working promptly. ::How does it work? Actually, CSS is much more than "macros", and it affects more than table styles. In general, it allows you to keep the definition of what something is, eg: this is a heading, from how it appears- EG- we want Heading 1's to have lines under then, 24 point Helvetica font, etc etc. CSS allows you to take HTML tags and redefine how they look. So really, I should have said that there is probably more in Common.css that we need beyond the standard table styles. But first things first. :As I said, if there are any unforseen consequences, we don't have to get wedged worrying about it. If something goes kaboom, it is no more difficult than reverting an edit. :Better to do this now, when there is only 4 or 5 of us looking, than when there are thousands of visitors a day....[[User:Phlox|'~'' Phlox']] 15:57, 2 October 2007 (UTC)